Keeping Our Schools Tops Protects Our Property Values

Jonathan’s answer to my question about what would happen if the budget doesn’t pass is kind of scary. After the school board spent so much time combing over every cost and class size in the budget, and then kept the increase to only .4% (or $200K), I’m not inclined to send them back to the drawing board with the 2 town governments holding a red pen. It’s hard to imagine, with how carefully the School Board actually cut and combined services to come in with this budget, that sending it back to the towns won’t seriously harm school programming.

But if you don’t have kids in the school system, why should you care about this? Does this issue significantly affect people whose kids aren’t in the school system (or whose kids are close to leaving, as mine are)?

You bet it does. Let me speak from my own personal experience.

My husband was relocated to Manhattan from Canada in 2007. Manhattan! We had no idea where we wanted to live. It was overwhelming – people suggested Connecticut and the counties above New York City, Long Island, and the city itself. We could have lived anywhere.

We knew we wanted to be able to easily drive back toward Buffalo where we were originally from, wanted to be near a transit line, and wanted to be near a particular church denomination. That narrowed it down to a very wide range of places in New Jersey. We had friends in Westfield, Bergen County, Princeton – narrower, but still a lot of choices. What to do?

I also have teenaged children, so the schools were going to be the deciding factor for us. So we toured schools (one school system told us they wouldn’t give us a tour unless we had a signed house contract in hand – we crossed them off our list!)

Looking at Chatham was an afterthought – my realtor lives here, and I looked at it for that reason only. But after Mr. LaSusa (high school principal) gave my daughter and me our tour, we walked out of the high school, looked at each other and both said – we love this place! And so Chatham it was.

Later we looked at Chatham houses until our heads almost exploded. When we eventually closed on our house, it had been on the market for a whole year and the price we paid was 30% below the original asking price.

What’s my point? Like an area with a great park or a great shore or a great shopping center, the Chatham schools are one of our area’s most significant attractions. Demographers will tell you that young families with kids buy houses as they turn over. Those families can buy here, and keep your housing values up (our house price would have slid further if we hadn’t bought it) or go elsewhere (we could easily have bought in Summit and gotten everything we were looking for).

So if you’re thinking you won’t be in your house forever (and who ever knows the reality of that), it seems to me that getting out and voting YES to the school budget is one of the most important and cost effective things you can do these days to preserve the value of your home and your municipalities. I want the next new family who tours a Chatham school to walk out of it and say ‘We love this place!’ too.

Any comments or personal experiences on this subject?

-Karen J